>First, I like programming and don't want to stop doing it just because a machine can do it too. Second, I'm pretty sure atrophied coding skills will make me worse at directing the machines, thus worse at what seems to be "the job" these days.

In theory wouldn’t atrophied coding skills not matter if models are sufficiently good at coding? I mean isn’t whats left just design and architecture and testing?

Sure, if LLMs are producing shit code you need to have an understanding of what it should do instead. But I think that day is already gone.

Its hard to think of a skill that you’d need to build with an LLM that requires writing meaningful amounts of code by oneself. From my end all the complexity is business logic and system design.

Do it! I have the same feeling and the hardest part is picking something that you are interested in. I have just kept the idea of "thinking of ideas" on my mind for a few days once I finish something. I usually come up with a few ideas if I'm always considering any little thing for a project. It has been fun and I have learned a few things along the way - more than I feel I do letting AI write most of the code.

I haven't actually tried it yet, but I think it'd be good to write a dsl for whatever you're doing. Then have ai make an interpreter to run it. Sort of as a way to stay... interested? Engaged?

That's exactly how i do all my personal projects. No agents, AI just for planning/research/debugging and occasionally for small bits of code i am not super interested in. For example I'm currently working in Go, but need to use a C library, and don't know C much at all. So when i get stuck with the C interop parts, sometimes i let the AI write bits of C for me, or let it write scripts for cross-compiling or other stuff i just find to be a pain. But I'm doing all the writing and logic myself.

Agents make it too easy to gloss over too much. They're great at work where i care about productivity but I've zero interest at home where the point is learning and having fun